He was the greatest living American painter (or so they said). In 1958 maybe, but he had gone through 30 years of financial hardship and mental struggle,
wrestling with the biggest question of all:
What could art do?
Could it cut through the white noise of daily life, connect us with the basic emotions that make us human: ecstasy, anguish, desire, terror?
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
Self-portrait from 1939 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

“A picture lives, by companionship, expanding
and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.
It dies by the same token.
It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.”
– – Rothko

After the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, Rothko said, you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them. So, could just colors and shapes move us, the way Michelangelo had.
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Rothko’s multiforms… It was all very seductive, loose, and pretty. Rothko started to sell. But he knew the difference between prettiness and power. And it was power that he was after. The power to take people somewhere they would recover their humanity.
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Untitled from 1958 (National Gallery of Victoria, Australia)

“When somebody asked him how close to the pictures they should stand, he answered, ‘Right back, about 18 inches.'”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

“The people that weep before my paintings, they are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them.”
– – Rothko

On the commissioned murals for the Four Seasons restaurant, Seagram Building (NYC)
“I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite
of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.”
(The New Yorker, April 5, 2010, p. 26).

That autumn… he and his wife Mel went to eat at the Four Seasons. Rothko was someone that thought it was immoral to spend more than five bucks on a meal, and was often perfectly happy with a Chinese take-away, the cheaper the better.  But as he sat among the millionaires with Mel his heart and his confidence sank like a stone. “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for that kind of money, will never look at a painting of mine”.

The next morning he looked at the 30 or so paintings, some of the most beautiful and moving things not only Rothko but any modern artist had ever created, and saw only the ruin of a great project.

His paintings would never hang in the Four Seasons.
Manhattan had beaten Mark.
Or had art had triumphed over money?
After all, how many artists do you know who would say ‘no’ to
two and half million dollars?
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Red on Maroon Mural [intended for the Four Seasons] from 1959 (Tate Gallery, London)

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing, no galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet is was a golden age. For we all had nothing to lose, and a vision to gain. Today, it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large, I will not venture to discuss.
But I do know that many of those who are driven to this life
are desperately searching for those pockets of silence, where we can root and grow.
We must all hope that we find them.”
– – Rothko

“By blowing up the look of things, Picasso was saying,
‘I’m getting beyond surface appearances to the core.'”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973)
Self Portrait from 1896 (Museu Picasso, Barcelona)

Self Portrait from 1907 (Národni Galerie, Prague, Czech Republic)

Self Portrait from 1971, “Self portrait facing death” (Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo)

“Cubism with a conscience.”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Guernica from 1937 (Reina Sofia, Madrid)

“What others has diagnosed as mental sickness,
Vincent thought was an illumination,
a new vision of what art could be,
a revelation of heaven here on earth.”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Self-portrait from 1889 (Musée d’Orsay)

Wheat field with Crows, July 1890 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

“It’s all about atmospherics, not finicky topographical description. Because that was what Britain was for Turner, a biological sentiment, an instinct in the blood, an irresistibly operatic arrangement of light, air, and water – elemental, heroic, legendary.”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)
Self Portrait from c. 1799 (Tate Galley, London)

“But even as he drifted through his home county’s Eden, Turner must have been aware that alongside this idyll there was another England, an England in distress. And something in Turner wanted to paint that England too.”

“A British art that will act out the suffering of victims.”

“Though almost all of his critics believed that the “Slavers” [“The Slave Ship”, originally “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on”] represented an all time low in Turner’s reckless disregard for the rules of art, it was in fact his greatest triumph in the sculptural carving of space.”

Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

The Slave Ship from 1840 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

“It was David who would give people the vision of what a true citizen was.”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)
Self portrait from 1794 (Musée du Louvre)

“Not just a painter then, but a physiologist of the human condition.”
“Art is the marriage of craft and imagination.”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)
Self portrait from 1660 (THE MET)

“So where ever you go in Rome now, you are really in the cavaliere’s [Bernini’s] city.”
Simon Schama (The Power of Art, BBC)

“When he wanted something, he got it by the look in his eyes alone.”
Filippo Baldinucci (1624-1697),
Italian art historian and biographer, including that of Bernini (written in 1682)

Bernini (1598-1680)
Self-portrait, 1623 (Italian Ways)